


Pain Is a Place You Belong

by Deannie



Series: The Tascosa Saga [2]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, M/M, Supermagnificent AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 13:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9126478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: The center of his life now lay below him, small but growing. He should have left as soon as he’d healed, damn it. He shouldn’t’ve been there in the first place. But Tascosa probably knew where he was now, and they’d come after Chris and the rest of them to get to him, whether he was here or not.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For the hc_bingo prompt wings

**Four years ago…**

Ella Gaines was seething.

“And why did it take so long to find him?” she asked, her voice low and dangerous.

“He’s very good at staying hidden.” Parker was normal and small and weaselly and she’d love to have someone break his neck, but it wouldn’t get her the information she needed. “It was pure luck that one of the men who’d been tracking him before the war was stopping in Eagle Bend on his way back here and recognized him.”

“Luck,” she scoffed. “Dumb luck.” Ella took a deep breath to control herself. This was _good_ news, after all. “So you’re telling me that Chris Larabee is alive and well in _New Mexico_? Not ten years dead on a battlefield in South Carolina?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Parker stuttered, shaking. Ella wrapped her glamours around herself, and he immediately calmed. A beautiful woman made everything better, didn’t she? She wouldn’t get him to do anything if he was cowering in fear.

“I want to know everything,” she said softly, her voice suddenly seductive. “If our man is still in the area, tell him to find out all he can about what Chris is up to these days.”

“But ma’am,” Parker said, unsure even in the face of her distracting power. “Sergeant Fallon is supposed to be back here—”

“I’ll deal with the repercussions,” she purred, watching the pathetic man melt. “Just have Fallon find out all he can, and you keep your mouth shut.” She smiled, and Parker was putty. “I want to make sure Chris is ready to see me again.”

“Miss Gaines?” One of Jepson’s lackeys was at the door, and Ella nodded Parker out and turned to face the new man. “They’re about to start the next test on subject J65.”

“Jepson’s bird,” Ella murmured. She smiled at the man in the doorway and he blushed.

As always, she wondered idly what he saw when he looked at her. Every man saw something different, but few of them could resist. Her glamours, as Lawrence had named them, could be put on and taken off with ease, making them the perfect disguise, really. While every man saw her as desireable, with a little effort, she could make a man see her just the way she wanted them to. With infinite choices of look and coloring, she could hide in plain sight.

But not from Chris Larabee. No, she’d never hide from him. Chris had been the only one she wanted, ever. Somehow even Lawrence didn’t have the power over her that Erskine’s superman had. She’d been sent to Illinois to try to befriend someone—anyone—in Erskine’s facility, and in that bar in the little town down the trail from it, she’d found Chris. Disillusioned and tired from too many sorties into too many places normal people didn’t know existed, Chris had welcomed a beautiful farmgirl with “nothing special” about her.

Chris had been rough and tender and powerful and she’d known, very quickly, that he could rival Lawrence, if he let himself. Fate and the Union Army had ripped him away from her, though, and then the war—she’d thought—had taken his life.

But he was _alive!_

“Ma’am?” Jepson’s man asked tentatively.

It would be a while before she heard back from Fallon and could start to formulate a plan. The young man Jepson called Wings was a beautiful creature, and the tests they ran on him were often intriguing, even if most of them were ultimately useless. A distraction, then. For now.

“Which serum is this?” she asked, walking toward him and watching him step quickly out of her way.

“Dr. Weller’s newest enhancement serum,” he replied, following her out the door and down the hall at a respectful distance.

 _His superman potion,_ Ella thought meanly. Weller was forever trying to replicate Erskine’s formula, always with varying degrees of failure. _None of them will work,_ she mused. _Not until we have Chris. The missing key._

Lawrence would be thrilled to know that Larabee—the one surviving recipient of the serum those idiot Confederates had destroyed so thoroughly with Erskine’s laboratory—could still be acquired. Goodness knew his blood held secrets, didn’t it? But Ella needed to make sure she put certain safeguards in place to protect her own interests before she let this cat out of the bag.

She walked into the observation room above the winged man’s cave and calmed herself at the sight of Lawrence Samson, standing by the window that looked down into the cavernous space.

Lawrence was alluring. Not handsome in the classical sense, of course, but that was hardly his concern. Where Ella showed people an illusion and made them want her, Lawrence showed people reality and made them want him anyway.

She’d met him when she was little more than a child and he was… more human than he was now. He knew her as intimately as any person alive, though they had never shared a bed. With all she’d learned and seen and done in her many years, she still felt that pull to be near him.

At eighteen, Ella had already known she could make others see her as desirable, alluring, needed. She’d pulled herself out of the crap heap that had been her family’s poverty-ridden existence and used her ability to amass enough money to move from town to town, allowing the next rich man to take a liking to her and give her whatever it was she needed at the time.

She’d seen him first in Hudson, Ohio, and while he hadn’t been rich or handsome, Ella had been fascinated from the moment he’d walked up to her and whispered in her ear.

“Your glamours surely aren’t your only gift, are they, my dear?” he’d asked, his voice rich and compelling, promising all sorts of power.

His talent aside, he’d been cunning and brilliant and shrewd. His mix of magic and science was like alchemy, and it allowed him to acquire the gifts of others without _necessarily_ having to steal them away. When she met him, he was exceptional. Now, more than thirty years later, he was nearly a god.

But gods were known for their appetites, and Lawrence’s often turned her stomach. He _could_ use his talents to steal gifts, souls, lives… And he liked to. The rituals were elaborate, sometimes carnal, and spoken of only in weeping incoherence, if the subject survived. She wondered, sometimes, if that kind of power would _always_ twist a man. Chris Larabee could certainly use some twisting, in her opinion, but if Lawrence’s plans to use him changed his appetites as well...

“Ella, my flower,” Lawrence murmured, making her heart leap just a little at the name he’d given her so long ago. “Come to see what Dr. Weller has cooked up today?”

Ella stepped up to the window, looking down at the man chained to a rock in the center of the room. Devin Tanner _was_ beautiful, in any sense. His light brown hair was far longer than a white man’s should be, dangling down his back past the wing bones that jutted out below his shoulder blades. From this vantage point, higher than he could see with the chains weighing him down, she couldn’t glimpse those blue eyes that Jepson thought might work more like a bird’s than a human’s. His body was softer now than it had been when he was captured three years ago. He was allowed to fly in his cave, occasionally, as long as there were snipers at every vantage point, but that rare exercise wasn’t enough to keep his muscles in shape.

And flying wasn’t what they wanted him for anyway.

Ella often wondered why they didn’t just dissect him like they had so many other physical exceptionals. She’d heard the old line about his metabolism and how useful it was to have a test subject who would exhibit a drug’s benefits (or drawbacks) for only a short time before metabolizing them completely. But she thought, just maybe, it was the beauty of those wings and the endlessly fiery spirit of him that kept him alive.

Jepson guarded him fiercely, and Ella had always had her own affairs, but sometimes, like today, she wished she could go in there, let him see her, and find out exactly what those bird-eyes saw.

He was yelling now, down there in the torch light, an incoherent bellow of rage and denial. It didn’t do him any good, she saw, as Jepson stepped back, handing the spent needle to his assistant.

“All right, Wings,” Jepson said, quietly, but loud enough that the cave picked up the sound and carried it whisperingly to the observation room. “Let’s see what this one does, shall we?”

They didn’t have to wait long. Tanner shuddered, his wings straining against their chains as he curled forward. After long minutes, he threw his head back and let loose a scream, and Ella wasn’t the only one to flinch back at the raw pain in his face.

A pain that rapidly turned to fury. He yanked again on those chains, all six of them, and Jepson jumped back as one of the arm chains snapped apart halfway along the length of it. A foot chain followed.

“Shall I have the men fire?” Samson’s security officer asked, leaning over the edge of the observation window to get a better look.

“No,” Lawrence murmured. “Let’s see. Let’s—”

With an animal growl, Tanner leapt forward, the rest of his restraints snapping, though his left wing now trailed blood in disturbing drips. He head butted Jepson, knocking the man cold, then landed on his assistant. He brought a fist to the man’s face and then launched himself into the air, heading for the small hole in the ceiling.

“What is he doing?” Weller asked. There was a thrill in his voice, along with the horror. This was certainly closer than he’d gotten to Erskine’s serum in the past. “He’ll never fit—”

Ella gasped as the winged creature rammed the ceiling, fists up into the air ahead of him, and punched through the sides of the hole, dislodging the grate there and widening the space enough for his starved, skinny body to slip out to freedom.

Lawrence sighed. “Alert the retrieval team,” he said, a trace of anger in his voice. “I expect him back before nightfall.”

“The serum will burn out in him soon,” Weller assured them all. “Just like the rest of them.”

Ella looked up at the hole in the ceiling. But how far could the young flyer get before it did?

*******

Devin screamed as he got his first taste of real air. He’d managed to get out of the cave once, months ago, he thought it was, but now…

Now power sang through every inch of him. Whatever they had in that needle, he was strong for the first time since he’d been chained. He felt the pain of his torn wing, the awkward bite to every downstroke, and ignored it all in favor of height. He flew up, up, away, God, anywhere they couldn’t get him. His eyes wouldn’t see right and they watered in the wind they’d all-but forgotten in the last however many days and weeks and months and years and he was _free!_

But faster than he’d like, the weight of the chains trailing from his limbs and his wings weighed him down. The strength was still there, still thrumming through him, but he couldn’t keep up in the thermals. Heavy wings didn’t glide.

“No,” he murmured hopelessly, feeling the world pull him down. “God, no, not yet.”

He wheeled into the sun, heading west, away from Jepson and his knives and his smiles that made Devin want to kill him. Doing that would only prove that they had done their job after all. Broke him. Turned him...

The earth was closer as he flew into the sun, evading the night that was falling east of him. He sobbed as his left wing faltered. God, he was never getting out, was he? Never. Rifles fired on the ground and he could see horses and men barreling after him. The wing dipped again, and Devin tried to pull himself out of the spin and failed, losing precious yards of sky before he righted himself.

The impact of a bullet in his shoulder had him screaming—

*******

—and Vin Tanner sat bolt upright, grabbing for the injury he hadn’t sustained in that escape attempt four years ago. No, the bullet in his dream had been Eli Joe’s, just two _months_ back, and Vin didn’t think the nightmare the damn man had started in him would ever end.

It had taken a long time for him to learn to live with the memory of Tascosa. The bolt holes in his wings were a constant reminder, the way the wind whistled through them as he flew, and God knew he’d never forget _all_ the things he’d seen, but if he was careful, he couldn’t clearly see the green eyes of the first man they’d tortured in front of him, or remember the way that little girl’s back had arched when they stuck that stick into her side—the one that vibrated and spat sparks.

If he was careful, he’d forget their names were Yoni and Hilda.

But careful didn’t mean shit now. The poison Eli had shot him with in the desert outside of town, the stuff that had boiled his brain and melted away his walls, made everything real and true again. His wings ached when he dreamed like he’d dreamed this morning, the memories were so clear.

He rose to his feet, hurting but not physically, and left the nest of blankets he’d made on the bluff overlooking Four Corners. He spent more time up here at night than down there. Because down there was just too damn hard.

The center of his life now lay below him, small but growing. He should have left as soon as he’d healed, damn it. He shouldn’t’ve been there in the first place. But Tascosa probably knew where he was now, and they’d come after Chris and the rest of them to get to him, whether he was here or not.

He’d stay. Protect them—sacrifice himself if he had to and take as many of Samson’s people with him as he could. He’d made a mess of things for too many people, and all because he wanted to feel a part of something. He should’ve known Jepson was right when he’d said he’d never amount to much.

For one thing, he looked to have ruined the friendship that had finally started growing between Chris and Ezra. Where the two men had seemed real comfortable around each other, finally, in the last couple of months before Eli Joe came, now Ezra managed to find reasons not to even be in the same room with Larabee.

Ezra was out of town again right now, in fact, running an errand for one of the local business people. Never known the man to be so damned accommodating before he got sliced and beat, and then found Chris shot up and too near to dying for comfort. _All because of me,_ Vin thought.

And then there was Josiah, who’d healed up just fine and forgiven him and told him all the things he was supposed to, but still… Hell, Vin didn’t know. Was just like Josiah had made some sort of decision about him, and while they talked as much as ever, something was different.

They all said they didn’t blame him, and he figured they were telling the truth, but that didn’t make it right that they’d been hurt because of him. Like the Comanche. Like those poor people in Tascosa…

Buck’d been more help on that account than Vin had ever thought he’d be. Of all of them, Buck was the last one Vin would’ve pegged to have gone through what he had during the war. The ex-soldier’s words came to him now, trying to call him back from his darkness. “The thing I learned—mostly through a couple hundred nights of soul searching—is that those men? They were just plain evil. Wasn’t me that did that, and they’d’ve done it whether I was there or not.”

Which worked fine for Buck, but Jepson had had a plan built around Vin himself. He’d made sure he picked people Vin would sympathize with, trying to pry his brain apart at first, change him into something they needed, break him and turn him evil like them and make him a tool. When that hadn’t worked, well… Jepson had just plain taken pleasure in hurting people in Vin’s name.

_“It seems Devin isn’t being too cooperative today,” Jepson’d say to whoever he had on the table that day. Or, “Unfortunately, Devin wasn’t able to do what we needed, so…”_

Stupid ass thing was, that hadn’t been the thing to break him. No, instead, the feel of Dr. Daly’s flesh under his fists as pummeled him to death back then merged with the feel of Eli Joe’s as he’d nearly done the same two months ago, and he fought down the urge to be sick.

_“Looks like we broke you after all, Wings,” Jepson had told him, as he stared at Daly’s body. He’d smiled a bloody smile. “Knew you had it in you.” And then Vin had cold cocked him and darted away like a sparrow being hunted by a hawk._

He’d escaped that time—better than he had the time before—and stupidly thought that leaving had set him free. Vin took a breath that was nearly a sob and launched himself into the air, trying to outfly his memories.

And God damn it, it never did work.

*********

Ella Gaines sat in the sunlight that spilled through her window, reading over the pile of papers scattered across her desk. She’d arrived back in Tascosa only two days ago, after coordinating things from her ranch a territory away. Everything was in place now, or would be soon. She just had to make sure she had all her thoughts together before she went down to make her case to Lawrence.

Eli Joe Guthry was a fool, and he’d gotten what was coming to him, but she could be glad of his hubris, just this once. The intelligence she’d gathered once she’d been informed that Chris Larabee had been located was the best they could do without sending someone into the town of Four Corners. Jepson had warned her that, paranoid as Devin Tanner was, he’d be expecting anything out of the ordinary, and that Dr. Samson wanted Tanner back alive. Of course, Ella wasn’t entirely sure he wanted him for Jepson’s use, but the fate of the young man was the least of her concerns.

Putting aside Lawrence’s more disturbing appetites, she slid a page out from the rest—a copy of the small town’s paper, called _The Clarion_.

“The streets ran red with the blood of twenty men today…” she murmured, a smile in her voice as she read. If only that were true. Chris had it in him—she’d seen it, long ago, well before Erskine’s death had lit a fire of righteousness in him, long before he’d turned his back on what he had been made to be and tried to settle down.

Having Fowler burn his family should have brought him to her forever. So eerily like coming back to the facility and finding Erskine and his friends and comrades burned and destroyed, Chris had arrived late enough to his own homestead to ensure that he would lose control, as he had when he’d hunted down and killed those Confederates before the war. She had been ready then, to slide in, offer him a shoulder, protection, guidance…

How Lawrence had found out, she was never really sure. But the ill-timed mission in New York had insured that it was Buck Wilmington, and not her, that Chris had turned to.

She pulled a sketch of Wilmington out from the pile and studied it. He looked just the same, blithe and carefree as ever. He’d grown a mustache that looked ridiculous on what was otherwise a handsome face. She had never met him, of course—Chris had been ripped away from her to avenge himself against the South before he’d ever collected the stray corporal—but her research at the time had revealed what he was.

And worse than just being an empath, he was a protector. After the fire, he’d folded Chris into his own care and saved him from himself and somehow, somehow, by the time Ella had returned from the East a year later, Chris Larabee was a legend that drifted through the territory too quickly to pin down. A gunfighter, certainly, and he’d left his trail of blood, but he was clearly holding back, and for that, in part, she blamed Wilmington as much as she did Chris’s normal, ordinary, pathetic ash-heap of a wife and child.

Well, now she would finally help Chris see his true potential.

The trick, of course, lay in breaking all ties to his wholesome life. Starting with Wilmington.

She spread out the sketches of the rest of the men that made up Chris’s support, puzzling over the crew and wondering what he saw in them.

Jepson’s bird was there, Wings. He was grown now, his face filled out in the last few years and wary. He wasn’t the delicate, broken thing she’d last seen hanging from his chains, mumbling his way through another testing cycle, but again, everyone had potential. She’d have to find the best way to crush his without risking Lawrence’s anger by killing him.

Beautiful—and potentially deadly—as his winged state was, he had been unturnable, despite Jepson’s best efforts. The fool still bristled at any mention of the one who got away. There had been talk among the experiments that Tanner was actually the angel he resembled, unsullied by the appetites of Man. But Ella had seen Daly’s body when Devin had finished with him. He was as human as any of them. And of course, Eli Joe was dead as well—presumably at Tanner’s hands.

She moved on, studying the drawing of an earnest-looking negro. Chris had found himself another healer, to replace Erskine’s girl from England. Tall and dark, there was a pain in Nathan Jackson, even from the sparse sketch Ella held in her hand. He would be a challenge, maybe. _Or maybe a treat,_ she thought with a smile. What Marconi would see in the exceptional was hard to say.

The others were stray dogs, and Chris had always been partial to collecting those: a child who couldn’t be more than twenty and had a look of reckless courage about him; a gambler she would have thought Chris would be more likely to shoot than befriend; and an old preacher too wedded to drink who, her informant had said, was trying to rebuild a mission just outside of town, on his own, stone by stone.

Well, they’d make a tasty bonus for Marconi, maybe.

The seven men had been hired by the circuit court judge to maintain order in the town, and so far, with a minimum of bloodshed, they’d been doing it. None of the townspeople seemed to know about the four exceptionals in their midst, strangely enough, though she supposed that the town she’d lived in in Illinois had been equally ignorant of the medical facility Erskine ran right under their noses….

 _Still,_ she mused, sliding Tanner’s sketch back toward her and looking it over. _How did you hide wings?_

********

_“He’s got a joint birds don’t have,” that was the man Eli Joe had handed him over to. Jepson. “See?” Blindfolded and tied, Devin couldn’t stop the hand that bent his flight knuckle forward, tucking his pin feathers under._

_Devin twitched his wing anyway, trying to wrench it out of the man’s hand and received a smack to the face in response, hard and shocking because he couldn’t see it coming. He growled into the darkness and ignored the chuckles. Chained hand and foot, his wings stretched out at his sides and half of them trapped in something that felt like netting, he couldn’t do much to fight back, but damned if he was going to just let them pull at him all day._

_“The wings fold down along his back, though I figure it took him a few years to learn how to do it properly, didn’t it, Wings?” Jepson asked._

_Devin kept his mouth shut. If he got free? He was going to kill each and every one of them._

_“So this is him? Our winged man?”_

_The new voice was rich and full of power, and in spite of himself, Devin turned his face toward it, wanting the blindfold gone, wanting to see who was talking. The draw of it was sickening and Devin fought against it._

_“He seems physically impressive, at least.” The voice was dismissive._

_“Oh, I think you’ll find he has potential, Dr. Samson,” Eli Joe said. Anger rose, and Devin rattled the chains on his hands and feet, his wings straining against the nets. He was going to gut that man for what he did to Kowa and the rest of the Comanche who had sheltered him._

_“And he has fire,” the voice added, maybe a bit of respect in the tone now._

_A hand touched his wing and Devin stilled suddenly, shocked by the silky, ghosting feel of it. Whoever it was, his touch carried power and death and yearning..._

_“Yes,” the voice said. He could almost hear it through that touch... “Impressive.”_

_The touch went away and Vin was left with a horrible cold feeling where it had been, like his wing had been soaked in a river in high winter. Made him want to throw up to know that a part of him desperately wanted the touch_ back _._

_“He could be made useful.” Jepson again. “I’ll certainly have fun trying, anyway.”_

_There was a long moment of silence that had Devin wondering what the hell he meant by that._

_“He’s yours for now,” the voice said. “Do something more permanent about restraining him, though. We can’t have him staked to a wall forever.”_

_Jepson was suddenly far too close, his breath obscene and rank. “I already thought of that,” he assured the voice._

_The pain of a flame-hot rod shoving through the skin of his wing came with the smell of burnt feathers._

**********

“Vin?”

Vin snapped out of the memory and found himself looking up at Nathan’s concerned face.

“You okay?” the healer asked carefully. He still hadn’t quite got the feel of where everything was in Vin’s wings, and it was a source of worry for him whenever something happened to hamper Vin’s flight.

Vin could have told him he’d survived a whole hell of a lot more than the world had thrown at him here in Four Corners.

“I’m fine, Nathan,” he assured him. “Ain’t been sleeping well, is all.” He stood, his feathers rustling on his back as his moved. They spent so much time trapped in muslin, he wondered if they wouldn’t just stick there eventually. Leave him earthbound.

He shuddered at the thought.

“I got some tea is good for that,” Nathan offered, following along beside Vin as he walked into the saloon’s dark coolness. “Might give you some rest.”

“Ain’t worth the risk, Nathan, but thank you.” He wouldn’t explain what the very thought of drugs and potions did to him. Didn’t bear repeating.

“Place’s been real quiet,” Nathan said, dismissing what he thought the problem was. “Looks like maybe Eli Joe really was working on his own.”

The two of them found Chris at the table in the back and sat next to him. Whiskey didn’t do much to Vin, but he aimed to drink a fair amount down anyway, hoping to take the edge off.

Josiah walked in right then and Vin dropped his eyes the second the old preacher’s met them. “Hell of a lot of damage for one man,” he grumbled. He feared the way their friendship was changing, falling on its side somehow...

“You mean Josiah?” Nathan asked, a tease into his voice. “Hell, don’t you know he’s too damn ornery for something like that to keep him down for long?” Josiah got his own drink and approached them, a curious look on his face that Vin tried to ignore. “Probably live forever, that one.”

“Bite your tongue,” Josiah replied, an edge of bitterness to the joke. He looked at Nathan, who looked at Vin. “Still feeling guilty, I see,” Josiah observed, scolding.

“Told him he was being an idiot, but he doesn’t listen,” Chris said quietly.

Vin growled at the scrutiny. “We done?”

Josiah smirked and drank his beer. “Well now, that depends on you.”

“Mr. Larabee!” Petey Markham called, thank God, running in like his butt was on fire. “Mr. Larabee, telegram!”

Chris paid the kid off and opened the telegram. “Hell.”

Vin tensed. He’d been waiting for the shit to fall. Maybe this was it.

“Problem, Chris?” Josiah asked.

“Not unless you call hauling out to Miller’s Mark to pick up a prisoner a problem.” Was a hell of a problem, actually. Miller’s Mark was three days hard ride from here. Chris frowned. “The judge wants me to take one of you with me.”

Josiah snorted in amusement. “Which means he wants you, specifically.”

Chris glared at him. And then he sized up Vin in a way that got him to sweating. “Figure if we leave after lunch, we can make a fair start before nightfall.”

Vin shook his head. “Chris, I don’t think—”

“Well, I do,” Chris told him harshly. “Skulking around here waiting for the world to fall on your head ain’t doing you any good, Vin.”

“And if someone from Tascosa comes looking while we’re gone?” Vin asked, just the thought of it giving him ice for guts.

“Then we never heard of you,” Buck said, sauntering up and taking the seat on the other side of Chris. Vin cursed his own inattention. He hadn’t even heard him coming. “Or if we have, you’re long gone.”

“Which we’re gonna be,” Chris said, standing. “Catch something to eat and get packed up. We’ll meet at the livery in an hour.” He bent down to finish off the rest of his drink. “Sooner we get there, the sooner we’ll get back.”

 _Maybe it’d be better if I just kept going,_ Vin thought, watching Chris walk out into the sunlight. Maybe he was a fool to try to protect them at all. Hadn’t done a damn bit of good with anyone else he cared for.

“You’d best be planning on both of you coming back, Vin,” Buck said quietly.

Vin looked over at him a second, but those eyes were too damn knowing. His chair scraped loudly in the quiet saloon. “Ain’t gonna let nothing happen to him, Buck,” he promised, purposely misunderstanding. “Don’t worry.”

“Ain’t him I’m worried about,” Buck called after him.

 _Well there’s sure as hell no reason to worry about me,_ Vin thought coldly. _I’m the one brought all this down on your heads._

God damn Eli Joe anyway.

*************

Ella controlled her breathing completely as she walked quickly toward the well-appointed rooms that had been carved into the cave system under Tascosa. The path to this part of the complex was long and twisting, and she used the time to prepare for seeing him again.

She knew Lawrence’s door wouldn’t be guarded. He didn’t need guards. And she wouldn’t knock because he didn’t need that either. _She_ needed to keep her head clear and her goal in sight. Keeping her pursuit of Chris a secret last time had been her undoing. This time, she would lay her cards on the table and hope he understood the wisdom of giving his blessing.

Ella walked into Lawrence’s rooms, marveling again at how he managed to make a cave seventy feet underground look like the finest salon in Boston. Though she supposed he had little choice in the matter. Lawrence no longer faced the sun as he used to. It was an enemy she wasn’t sure he could fight.

“Ella,” Samson purred, his voice soft and rich and inviting. She held to her own thoughts in the face of his overwhelming presence. “It’s good to have you back.”

He appeared from behind the red velvet curtains that screened off the inner rooms of his personal complex. She’d never been back there—didn’t know anyone who had, save those subjects he took a special liking to.

“Thank you, Lawrence,” she replied quietly.

Lawrence Samson was a handsome man now. His hair was dark and full, long enough to curl gently at the nape of his neck, but short enough to be proper. His face was unlined and perfect, every inch youthful and gay, though she still remembered the wrinkles and age of him when first they met, signs of the years that had been slowly erased in the last decade and more, thanks to new knowledge he never stopped acquiring. It wasn’t glamours that made him look this way, but the subtle manipulation of Nature and his hunger for the youth of others.

Satisfying that hunger came at a price. He was different now, unreal in a way that frightened most, but left her enthralled. He was ephemeral, ghostly—solid and substantial only when he chose to be. She didn’t know what plane of existence he lived in now, but this one or the next, he still managed to affect all things around him, and Ella craved the power as much as the presence of him. She always had.

“I hear Mr. Guthry’s met a bad end, finally,” he commented, gesturing to the brandy on the sideboard. Ella nodded and walked over to pour them twin glasses. “It seems young Mr. Tanner has more teeth than he thought.”

Ella sighed, watching Lawrence’s hand as it thickened into reality and grasped the brandy snifter. She sometimes wondered if he tasted the fine liquor the way a normal human did, or whether it filled some other need in him now. His red eyes flashed both amusement and irritation at her scrutiny, and Ella called herself to order.

“Yes,” she replied. “Well, Jepson has always maintained that he has potential.”

“You think I was wrong to keep our little sparrow chained all that time?” Lawrence asked, his voice low and a shade dangerous.

Ella tensed. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to use him more effectively,” she replied. It didn’t do to try to backtrack when you spoke to him. He’d know exactly what you thought.

“I agree,” he answered easily, light and airy once more. “But I don’t believe Jepson’s pet could ever be turned.” There was a touch of sadness and yearning in him. “Perhaps if he’d had a demon’s wings instead of an angel’s.”

She smiled softly at that, remembering the last time she’d seen the young man. He’d looked like a kicked puppy, his stunning wings spread wide by chains, the left one blood-stained from a recent escape attempt. He’d been in the throes of a test—a potion Weller had devised to try to heighten the senses—muttering in the darkness of his cell. She didn’t remember whether the experiment had worked, but honestly, she’d been briefing Fowler on Chris’s pathetic little family and there had been a lot to coordinate.

Tanner had been claimed by Jepson from the first, and Ella had had her own interests. She supposed, when the time came, that lack of contact during his time in the complex would be helpful, but the memory of his wings was one that was hard to forget.

“You had something to discuss, my dear?” he led. Damn. She’d let her mind wander. Dangerous where Lawrence was involved.

“There’s the question of the man Devin is currently spending his time with…” she began. Her glamours rose unbidden as she thought of her love, and she heard her own voice slide into a purr that few normal men could resist for long.

Of course Lawrence wasn’t a normal man. And neither was the current topic of conversation.

“Chris Larabee,” Lawrence said, a smile playing about his lips. His entire body became mostly solid and he sank luxuriously onto the velvet divan. Ella perched primly on the chair across from it and waited. “You still believe you can bring him to us?” He sipped his brandy and his grin was stingingly mocking. “It hasn’t gone so well the last couple of times, has it?”

Ella swallowed her anger. “I could have had him come to us willingly the last time, if I hadn’t been otherwise indisposed.”

“If I hadn’t had you spirited off to New York, you mean?” Lawrence sighed. “You are obsessed, my flower,” he told her candidly. “You acted without my knowledge and you could have brought it all down around us.”

Ella leaned forward. “But we’re stronger now, Lawrence,” she told him. “ _I’m_ stronger.” She let her glamours fuel the sincerity of her smile. “As angry as I was at you for sending me away right when I could have harvested Chris’s anger and pain… You were right to pull me back and teach me more.” She reached out toward the divan, touching his hand, feeling how it couldn’t really be touched at all. “Let me use it now.”

Lawrence considered his glass, firming up the hand she touched so that he could slide his fingers caressingly against hers, leaving frigid trails in his wake. “He is definitely a prize, my dear,” he conceded. She exulted. Samson had always seen the worth of what Chris could bring to them if prepared. “I assume you have a plan?”

Ella had thought about this every day since the moment she’d watched Chris’s rage build as he stared into the smoldering ruins of his “normal” home. She knew just the way to do it, to crush this ridiculous thread of valor running through him.

“I do,” she said confidently. “I believe I can make him see my way of thinking. Help him to see his true worth.”

“I look forward to the fruits of your labor, then,” he said as he smiled broadly and rose. It was a clear gesture of dismissal and Ella rose as well and headed for the door without a word, stunned to have been given this so easily.

“Ella, dear?” he called her, stopping her cold with the force of his will. “If you can manage it, I do want Jepson’s angel back,” he purred, and Ella fought to hold down the fine brandy she’d just imbibed. “I believe he may have unplumbed depths after all.”

“I’ll make sure he finds his way back,” she promised.

And as she left, she shuddered to think about what, exactly, the old man would do with him.

********

_“It looks like he could be useful,” said a short, skinny man with a funny accent. He had no hair, but his gray eyebrows were bushy. “When will you begin indoctrination?”_

_Jepson smiled, reaching over to grab a needle that had Devin’s palms sweating. At the same time, a table was wheeled in with a big powerful man strapped to it. Devin’s mouth ran dry._

_“Right about now, I think,” Jepson said, reaching out and jabbing the needle into Devin’s neck without warning. The damned stuff felt like sludge going in and Devin tried to torque away from it until Jepson took him by the throat and half choked him as he forced the liquid into his vein._

_Devin barely felt him let go, the sludge sliding into him and feeding nooks and crannies and making the world dip and dive around him. He felt cold and hot at once, his body thrumming with power and heavy and broken and buzzing…_

_Through a haze of gray that made everything but the air sharp and painful, Devin watched Jepson walk over to the table with the man on it, looking at a bunch of knives that sat there and danced like Jepson’s eyes had a couple of minutes or hours or weeks ago. “Do you want to watch?”_

_“No,” Devin whispered, even though there was something curious in him that did. He couldn’t hear himself over the green and putrid sound of the man with the bushy eyebrows._

_“Oh certainly,” the man said. He smiled up at Devin, though, instead of looking at Jepson cut into the… Was he cutting into the guy?_

*********

“God damn it.”

Vin shook himself hard in the dawn, his feathers rustling loudly.

“You all right?”

Chris’s call startled him and Vin looked up to find the old soldier sitting across the fire.

“Fine,” he replied, standing and stretching his wings. There was something to be said for a man to watch your back—he knew without doubt that it was safe to show himself with Chris standing guard. He’d miss that.

“Bullshit,” Chris replied. He stirred the fire, and Vin noticed he’d already started a pot of coffee—Vin’s poison, not his.

Poison…

“I never did thank you proper,” he said, choosing not to respond.

“For what?” The irritation in his voice said Chris wasn’t going to let the conversation slide for long.

“Not sure I could’ve lived with killing him like that,” Vin replied very quietly, another dead man in his head. “Man deserved to die, and I ain’t sad he’s gone, but…”

“But you ain’t him, Vin.” Chris caught his eyes and held them, and Vin couldn’t believe the trust there. Sure as hell shouldn’t be for him. “You ain’t him and you couldn’t ever be. I reckon that’s why they did what they did to you.”

Vin’s heart clenched in shame. “What…?”

“When you were off your head, you spent more time there than here,” Chris explained. “Said some things.”

Vin shook his head. “I see,” he whispered. God damn it.

“Vin, none of it was your fault,” Chris told him firmly.

“Tell that to them,” Vin growled, anger burning into the cool desert night as the ghosts seemed to surround him. “So damn many of ‘em, Chris.” Chris opened his mouth to say something, but Vin cut him off. “Nothing to be done about it. I fucked it up. Figure there’s got to be a way to fix this, but damned if I know how.”

“You didn’t fuck anything up,” Chris told him. Probably for the hundredth time. “I don’t know how Eli Joe found you, but he’s dead, and he didn’t get a chance to tell anyone where you were—”

“We don’t know that—”

“And if he _did_ ,” Chris spoke over him brutally. “Then we’ll deal with it.”

Vin tucked his wings in and dropped back to the ground. “I ain’t gonna see another man die because of me, Chris,” he told him coldly.

“Ain’t nobody died for you, Vin,” Chris said, the candor in his voice making Vin’s hands ball into fists. “Any more than my family and Erskine and Peggy died for me or all those soldiers in Carolina died for Buck.” He threw a stick on the fire and the force of the throw buried half the length of it. “They died because people are evil.”

Maybe that was what got Chris up in the morning, but it didn’t make much sense. “Nice idea, but none of those people’d be dead right now if I wasn’t still alive.”

“They’d all be dead for someone else, then,” Chris said. “What the hell makes you so special that you’re the one calls down that much suffering?”

Vin stood, his wings dropping to full length, pin feathers trailing in the dirt next to his feet as he started to pace. “Chris—”

“Tascosa comes for you, we’re not letting them take you,” Chris vowed, noble and stupid and earnest. “Hell, I figure they wouldn’t mind having every damn one of us in a cell, if they had their chance, so we got no choice but to fight, do we?”

“And whose fault is it that they even know you’re there?!” Vin demanded.

“Eli Joe Guthry’s.”

Vin snorted and shook his head. Turned away because Chris’s notions were too difficult. “So damn simple for you, Cowboy,” he growled.

“I’ve spent almost twenty years blaming myself for not being at the facility when it was attacked,” Chris said quietly, every word a grating pain. “Spent the last four wondering why the hell me and Buck stayed in Mexico that extra day—why I came home to ashes and soot instead of a little boy and a wife and a baby on the way.”

Vin turned to him to see heat in his face and tears in his eyes.

“Ain’t nothing simple about being the one who survives, Vin,” Chris whispered. “But God damn it, you _do_ survive.” He sniffed in the growing light. “Makes the ghosts hate you that much more if you give up.”

_“Why don’t you just give up, Wings?” Jepson asked. “Don’t you know we’ll always come for you?”_

Vin did know. They’d always come for him.

“I spent my whole life fighting, Cowboy,” he said quietly. “Fighting death with Ma. Fighting what I turned into when the wings came. Fighting scum like Eli Joe and evil inside that damn complex…” He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Damn tired of fighting.”

“Come back to me in thirty or forty years and tell me how tired you are then,” Chris said, a bitter cast to the words. Hell, of all the people to whine to like this.

“Chris, I’m sorry—”

“We’ve all make choices we wish maybe we hadn’t,” Chris cut him off. “You can lay down and die if you want, but I swear to God, among the six of us, we’ll figure a way to drag you back.”

Vin snorted, thinking about Nathan and his healing and Josiah and his…

“Reckon maybe I got a bit of fight left in me after all,” he allowed, feeling a little bit less hopeless. The six of them. The Seven of Us. Shit, maybe they _were_ a match for his demons. A match for Tascosa.

But he damn sure prayed they’d never have to find out.

*********

A knock on the door had Ella gathering energy to use her glamours, but a curt, “It’s Marconi,” made her drop her airs again. Hal Marconi wasn’t worth the bother. He didn’t care what a person looked like, after all. It was what was inside that he had an abnormal hunger for.

“Come in.”

The man who walked in the door seemed wholly unremarkable. He was of average height, maybe a little on the small side, but not notably so. His skin was pale without being sickly, his hair was short and middling brown, his eyes were sharp and intelligent, but a plain and forgettable blue. Ella shook her head as he walked in. People discounted him, and that would be their downfall.

Hal was one of those exceptionals who truly understood his own worth. His ability to crawl into the minds of others, read their every thought, and saunter right back out again without anyone the wiser had made him a wealthy man. Any politician would pay whatever he asked to make sure their secrets stayed secret.

But there were things Marconi sought after that were much more important to him, his appetite for the pain and horror and ecstasy of others ensured that he’d attack his assignment in Four Corners with relish. There was only a thin line between reading a man’s mind and destroying it, after all, and Marconi crossed it without remorse.

“Rollins said you had another job for me,” he said, standing calmly in the center of the room. It was like watching a snake lying in the sun, waiting for his prey. Ella knew he knew secrets about her, about nearly everyone here, in fact, but she also knew that there was no reason for him to use them against her. Not when she kept him well-fed.

“I do,” Ella agreed, eager to get to the next part of her campaign. “I have a group of men I need neutralized.”

Marconi snorted. “Is that all? Surely you have hired guns for that.”

Ella grinned invitingly. “I do, but these men need a more exceptional touch. So naturally I thought of you.”

He straightened up, hungry as always. “Gracious of you,” he allowed warily. He pushed against the walls of her mind, but Ella had learned tricks over the years. He wouldn’t get through without a fight.

“Now, Hal,” she told him primly. “You know I deal straight with you. Always.” She walked over to her desk and retrieved the sketches she’d received. “Your target is the one on top,” she told him, handing them over. “Buck Wilmington. I want him to hurt.”

Marconi raised an eyebrow at the venom in her voice, but didn’t comment. Instead, he looked over the pictures beneath Wilmington’s: Jackson, Sanchez, and Dunne. She’d written what little they knew about them on the bottom of each page, and she waited as Marconi scanned the words quickly. “So what are these others, then?” he asked.

“Payment,” she said sweetly. “Dunne and Sanchez are normals, unfortunately, but Jackson is an exceptional.” She smiled. “Surely worth the torture of one little empath?”

Marconi grinned in response and shook the pictures at her. “I’ll let you know.”

“Just make it slow for him,” she requested. “He’s cost me years and he deserves payback.”

“Who are _they_ , then?” Marconi looked at the remaining sketches on the desk, and Ella snatched them up.

“Payment of a different kind,” she told him dismissively, grabbing the pictures of Chris and Tanner to her chest. Standish’s she left where it was. He’d be dealt with by others. She couldn’t afford to waste time having Marconi go after him when he was out of town anyway.

“Whatever,” Marconi replied blithely. “Where am I headed?”

“Four Corners, New Mexico,” she said, regaining her composure. “I expect you to have this taken care of quickly.”

Marconi pouted slightly and she grinned. “But that’s not to say you can’t enjoy yourself.”

Another knock on the door produced a telegraph runner, and Ella paid him off, reading the missive and smiling. Chris and Wings had just left Four Corners, headed north toward Miller’s Mark as the bogus telegram from their “Judge” had instructed. Perfect. Two birds with one stone.

“Forget what I said,” she told Marconi with a grin. “Take all the time you need.”

“Oh really?” he asked, all but salivating at the thought.

“Really,” she assured him. Now all she had to do finish cutting Chris out of the herd and teach him where he belonged. “It looks like providence has put everyone exactly where I need them to be.”

********

God damn Eli Joe anyway, Miles Jepson thought, sitting back in his chair as his latest pet tried to find his way out of the maze laid out in the room below his observation deck. He was doing a good job of it, too. Born without eyes, the young boy could hear the air bounce off of any object, it seemed like. He’d been a little too slow to get completely out of the way of the last dart that came at him, but he was only twelve. They wouldn’t start tipping the darts with Weller’s goods until he’d been around for a while.

Unless the Man Himself decided to take an interest in him. But Miles would try to keep that from happening. The child could be of use—who’d suspect a little blind kid of being an assassin, after all? They could make a pretty penny off of a few crooked politicians. And since Miles had never met a straight one, there were a hell of a lot of clients to choose from.

You couldn’t use an assassin if your boss turned the kid’s mind to so much mush.

That had always been Miles’s worry about Wings. The kid’s talent seemed like it was purely physical though, which was a help. Even if Devin spent a month behind Samson’s velvet curtain, he couldn’t make the old man sprout wings. Samson could take an inner talent, but the structural ones were beyond him.

Still, there’d always been something alluring about Devin Tanner. He was hardly a saint, but he had a core of goodness they hadn’t been able to break him of, no matter what Miles tried. And Miles had tried damn near everything.

Not _everything everything_ though. Miles looked over at the orb one of Samson’s scouts had acquired from the Indians way up north. It sat in its box, light blue and pulsing, waiting to be used again. Miles’s last pet had succumbed to the power of the thing pretty damn quickly, turning vile and cold and worse than the Devil being cheated out of a soul. The orb had burned him out too fast, but Miles knew from experience that Devin was stronger. Strongest pet he’d ever had...

And now Eli Joe had put his angel into Gaines’s sights. Freak of a woman had more power and evil than sense, and Miles was afraid she’d sacrifice Wings to get what she wanted.

“Mr. Jepson?”

Miles turned to see a young man in the doorway, an envelope in his hand.

“Give it here,” he demanded, watching the boy scamper off in terror.

_Miles,_

_I seem to have conflicting orders, but as the old man will always trump a useless hag with pretty trappings, I just wanted to assure you that I’ll do everything I can to make sure you get your pet back._

_I’ve seen your new one, by the way. He looks very interesting._

_Hal_

Miles sighed, watching his pet dodge the next dart with more skill. He was nice, but he wasn’t Wings. When Hal got back _if_ he brought back the angel, Miles would make this child a gift for him.

He himself would certainly have other things to occupy his time.

********  
the end

  



End file.
